Clinical Analytics and Decision Support

Insights

Chief Nursing Officers (CNOs), essential members of health system C-Suite teams, need healthcare decision support to align nursing resources with systemwide goals.
Although nursing’s purpose hasn’t changed, the tools and skills needed to achieve it have. In today’s data-driven, increasingly complex care environment, nursing leaders rely on skills that extend beyond their initial training as nurses; they need expertise in finance, IT, and analytics, among other areas.
CNOs, like Faye of Pennington Health, depend on healthcare decision support systems for easy access to data that helps them identify and prioritize the best opportunities, address challenges, and improve outcomes.
CNOs who embrace the fact that advanced analytical tools are critical to improving care quality and reducing care costs are poised to effectively lead their systems toward achieving financial, strategic, clinical, and operational objectives.

Without daily access to healthcare decision support, health system COOs struggle to make rapid, meaningful decisions. Healthcare decision support systems are no longer optional for these highly visible leaders, who play critical roles in their organizations’ success, for many reasons:

Aggregates reliable, up-to-date information from all available sources.
Presents information in user-friendly, user-configurable ways.
Makes trends and important conclusions more recognizable and understandable.
Enhances C-Suite’s ability to drill down into data in search of a problem’s root cause.
Improves C-Suite communication and collaboration.
Unites C-suites around a common vision and strategy.

Healthcare COOs (and other C-Suites) need healthcare decision support to be data-driven problem solvers and collaborative leaders who achieve clinical, financial, and operational success for their systems. Given the industry’s increasing complexity, healthcare decision support is now an industrywide imperative.

Supporting decision making is a top goal for CFOs today, according to a 2017 Kaufmann Hall CFO survey. Healthcare decision support empowers CFOs and their finance teams to make accurate, agile, and timely decisions, from rolling forecasts of future trends to risk-adjusted scenario modeling.
In addition to helping CFOs make good decisions, healthcare decision support helps CFOs lead their teams and organizations improve in four key ways:

With healthcare decision support, CFOs and their health systems have a distinct competitive advantage (e.g., shortened planning cycles and more accurate cost measurement). They can adjust to unexpected challenges and take advantage of new opportunities.

Healthcare CEOs and other C-Suite leaders can’t make quality decisions in today’s rapidly changing, complex environment without decision support.
Healthcare CEOs are starting to realize that executive dashboards with personally tailored views of key metrics are no longer a luxury, but an absolute necessity, for three key reasons:

Helps leaders analyze and digest large amounts of data relating to care quality, operations, contracting, and major purchasing decisions.
Gives leaders a clear understanding of the financial aspects of their systems, such as revenue streams, cost drivers, costs of capital, bundled payments, and payment reforms.
Facilitates conflict resolution and helps leaders work collaboratively—using a matrix management approach—with peers, direct reports, and system experts.

Today’s healthcare CEO must be skilled problem solvers, strategic and analytical thinkers, and collaborative leaders who understand both the clinical and financial sides of healthcare—goals made possible with an executive dashboard.

Healthcare leaders are struggling to make effective, data-driven decisions given the industry’s unexpected, complex, and rapidly changing challenges, from advancing healthcare reform to rising consumerism.
Fortunately, there’s hope with the next generation executive decision support system, which facilitates decision making in several key ways:

Aggregates reliable, up-to-date information from all available sources, and makes it readily accessible.
Enables leaders to break information down and view it in more user-friendly ways—often in the form of graphs that make important conclusions or trends more recognizable and understandable.
Supports a leader’s ability to drill down into the data in search of problems’ root causes.
Plays an important communication and collaboration role, helping leaders work with the intellectual assets of the organization to problem solve and align the organization around a common vision and strategy.

Managing change in today’s industry is a difficult endeavor, but an executive decision support system can help leaders navigate this complexity and make effective, data-driven decisions.